


Mirrors and Spies

by methacrylate



Category: Lord Peter Wimsey - Sayers
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 19:37:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/methacrylate/pseuds/methacrylate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Begins with Peter and Harriet at the river during /Gaudy Night/.  Why is Peter so sensitive about Donne?  An alternative explanation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mirrors and Spies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Colourofsaying](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colourofsaying/gifts).



Some things were his. Donne. Why had she forced such a dangerous observation? Damn. Damn. Damn.

He loved her. He wanted her. But his thoughts were his own. And his poets. Besides, it was too much of an admission—not just a sensualist, but a Godly one. Redemption and sin all in one. He couldn't admit what she had already guessed, not now, when too much remained unsaid.

Of course it was partly shirking off, an unwillingness to remember the trembling hands before the altars of his youth. Women of beauty and, so he thought, of languid mind, categorically inferior and his goddesses by right. It had been such a shock.

He politely but consistently closed the door to Harriet's inquiries. His mind went on working, though.

It worked over the years to a world he hadn't ventured back to in a long time. It was before the war. A lazy summer after Trinity term. He had time for indolence and long luncheons, experimenting with a monocle, quoting Keats and Emily Bronte, visiting the tailor nearly every week. His mother did not worry. "Oh Gerald was even worse in his time," she would say on inquiry, "it was hats and that horrible moustache and cologne. Peter is just pruning or pluming or, that is to say, being a peacock."

He was also forming ideas about women. Partly, he relied on observation. He watched them walk, watched them talk and toss their heads. He developed an eye for a woman's hat. He had always known about ankles.

He read too much poetry and began to develop an irritating faculty for quotation. Even the chattiest of men is silent when he reads. Except that he sometimes read aloud, feeling for cadence, listening for something. He loved Donne. He believed everything he said about love and about women, or at least everything he thought was said. He had such devout expectations.

Her name was Barbara. An actress playing at the Empire theatre. She spoke words beautifully, and her hair shone. She had ankles.

The play was Shakespeare, the Tempest. She was Ariel. He came the first night for the play and the next night for her. Then the next. He watched her for two weeks, noticing the little shifts from night to night, changes in gesture, small flickers in inflection. He was mesmerized by the magic she made on that stage. He wanted more than to speak to her.

After all, she was beautiful, and he wanted to be in love.

He wrote her a note, simple and, as he thought, dignified. He most admired her work and should like very much to speak with her about Shakespeare (only later did it occur to him that she might wish to speak on such a subject in and of itself; his notions of women were rich in some ways, but rife with gaps in others).

She wrote back.

"Dear Lord Peter,

I received your note with some surprise and no small hesitation. It is not my custom nor my management's preference that I respond to invitations from audience members, however charming. I am charmed, however, and will meet you for tea after the matinee on Saturday. You will find my at Tansy's two blocks from the theatre.

Yours sincerely,

Barbara Fitzgerald"

It was not the most encouraging note he could have wished for, but he was in a mood to be encouraged. He wore his most flattering suit, thought of flowers and laid the thought aside. He was very young and looked it. His skin was a little paler than the day before. Today he walked swinging a cane and thinking of all the flattering things he could say to the woman with sleek hair and a voice he thought he could never tire of hearing, a voice he heard in his dreams--dreams as yet full of nothing but desires and vague fears in succession, with nothing of the wastes of later nightmares.

They met. He told her that she was the most magnificent Ariel that he had ever seen. She said thank you. He wanted to know why she was an actress. She said that it was a profession that was open to her and that she like words. Pantomimes were alright and they paid the bills, but blank verse was better. He just wanted to look at her. Fortunately his mouth seemed able to talk even when his insides went weak. He had an impulse to run and tell his mother about this creature he had found, so perfectly desirable. Why did he always want to tell her?

Barbara was entertained but puzzled. This boy in his extreme suit and extreme nose seemed fascinated by her, for reasons she could not at first fathom. Men noticed her. That was neither particularly new nor particularly welcome. Too many people saw her.

He kept talking. She kept being charmed. They met again, this time for coffee under dimmer lights. She told him more. She told him about the places she wanted to see, her bitter years in a provincial theatre. She even hinted at the domestic grind of her working life, all its pans and washing and markets. He didn't quite hear it.

He was lost elsewhere, demanding that the world "for Godsake hold [its] tongue, and let me love." He took her hand but for the most part saw pages traced with someone else's love.

The restaurants he took her to were lavish, and diamond earrings were swell. Yet she gradually began to feel that she was a theoretical woman, a character in some other drama. Even though she had no script.

She liked his smell and his beautiful hands. It was difficult to find private moments to kiss but they managed. It was still strange to her, the places that seemed to materialize for this young man. London seemed suddenly full of discreet doors and tables with curtains. His hands took their time, and summer waned.

He was intoxicated. A beautiful woman was his. He could tell her pretty nothings and watch her respond under his hands. In his head she was his America, his newfound land. His Uncle Paul started to hear rumours.

She started to share a bed with him. It made her feel old, although she wasn't. She hadn't wanted to be a teacher, but that is how it went. He was a good pupil. Finally, it had been long enough. For too long she tried to manufacture a tenderness that was not there and failed. One day she told him that they had better stop seeing each other anymore, but take this she said, handing him a flat package wrapped in brown paper.

He opened it in a cab going blindly to anywhere. It was a book. It was Donne. He looked for an inscription or any other sign of her in it. None was there.

He read it again that night as he had before, sitting up and very still, forming words on his lips with no sound. He found that only the words were the same. The sting had somehow gone out. He thought again of Harriet in the sunshine, daring him to speak.

**Author's Note:**

> with apologies to /The Picture of Dorian Gray/
> 
> Quotations taken from /the Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne and the Complete Poetry of William Blake/ The Modern Library, 1941.


End file.
